Steering Committee on women hosts panel

President Tilghman led a panel discussion Wednesday night with members of the Steering Committee on Undergraduate Women’s Leadership about the 114-page report the committee published on Monday after a year-and-a-half investigation into women’s campus leadership.

Five of the committee’s 18 members were on the panel, including Tilghman, Committee Chair and Wilson School professor Nannerl Keohane, Whitman College Dean Rebecca Graves-Bayazitoglu GS ’02, sociology professor Thomas Espenshade GS ’72 and Pyne Prize recipient Amelia Thomson-Deveaux ’11.

Tilghman, who formed the committee in 2009 to examine the differences between the types of leadership roles filled by different genders, said she was motivated to start it because 2009 was the 40th anniversary of coeducation at the University and because a series of personal observations suggested the campus was home to gender-based leadership disparity.

“In summer 2009, I was visited by head of Rhodes Scholarship trust Don Markwell GS ’85, and he wanted to know why Princeton had so few women Rhodes Scholars over the past few years,” Tilghman said. “I didn’t have an answer for him.”

In fall 2009, Tilghman said, she saw a front-page photo in The Daily Princetonian of the freshmen running for USG positions and was surprised to see only men.

“As I was mulling over in my head these independent anecdotal pieces of information, I thought there may be things happening on this campus that we’re not conscious of,” Tilghman said. “An important mission of our University is to empower students, and I wanted to understand whether men and women were [being] empowered [during their four years here].”

To begin instating the practical applications of the committee’s work, Tilghman said, she hopes to make concrete changes to the freshman orientation program.

“Orientation should be reorganized to include participation of more upperclass students to give freshmen an opportunity to build connections with current students on campus,” said Graves-Bayazitoglu, a member of the first-year experience subcommittee. “This creates a sense of ownership and belonging and a level of comfort for women to put themselves forward for leadership early in their time here.”

According to Graves-Bayazitoglu, two surveys the committee sent to current freshmen this past August and November showed that women lowered their expectations about leadership roles more quickly than men do.

In the classroom, Tilghman said, she hopes to change the dynamic of participation-based seminars to allow women more space and time to speak.

“Especially in smaller group settings, men have a tendency to jump out on a question like hungry lions on a piece of meat,” Espenshade said.

The committee’s final report suggests that professors wait for about five seconds after asking a question to give students more time to think.

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Espenshade also said he hopes gender-neutral grading, collaborative learning between students and more positive reinforcement for women will be implemented.

Keohane said that the committee also wants to encourage men and women to pursue both high-profile leadership positions and “behind-the-scenes” roles. According to the committee's report, women have held fewer high-profile positions in the past decade than they did in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s.

“We have a lot of to-do’s already that are going to be relatively straightforward, and the harder thing is designing great mentor programs and having them be self-sustaining,” Tilghman said. “That will take some more thinking and more work.”

“What we hope will be the case is [that] conversations like this among students will raise the visibility of the issues on campus,” Keohane said. “Students helping each other to think more constructively about leadership for both women and men is going to be one of the most important places the report will make a difference.”